This website is all about South
Australian ambulances, with photos and information about the vehicles and the
organisations that operated them.

In an emergency dial 000, call for help and do first
aid!

Our site is dedicated to providing a history of South Australian
ambulances, such as the Holden Panel Van and Em-Care ambulances and the Ford
Transit, F-100 and F-250 Petrol and Diesel Twin-Life ambulances, along with the
Mercedes Sprinter.You will find photos
provided by colleagues and friends, many of whom have worked as volunteer and
career ambulance officers or patient transport officers in the St.John
Ambulance Service or South Australian Ambulance Service, while others serviced
the ambulances at Hindmarsh or Fulham and helped to keep them running reliably
and safely.

The common theme binding all of us together, whether St.John or SAAS,
Royal Flying Doctor Service or Industrial is that we were ambulance officers or
paramedics and wanted to save lives and help people.To many, these vehicles are just trucks or
vans, but to those of us who worked in them for hours on end, they are where
mates relied on one other to perform near-miracles under very trying conditions.South Australians over the years have been
able to depend on their ambos to come when they are hurt or injured, whether
they are in Adelaide or Coober Pedy, MountGambier or Kingscote.But we couldn’t have saved any one’s life
without safe and reliable ambulances, great training and professionalism, good
equipment, or our strong esprit de corps.

Welcome to the SA Ambos website, please enjoy some of our history, and
thanks for visiting, from Andrew, Bill, David, Doug, Kevin, Lyndon, and the
countless other ambulance officers of South Australia.

If we haven't got an ambulance picture displayed - but
you’ve got it and would like to share it – we would love to hear from you.Please call us or send an email! All contributions
(including corrections that prove us wrong) are always gratefully accepted!

Holden HZ
Em-Care Fleet 50, from a picture posted on the old-Holden's website by
Allen Smith.This vehicle was a Marion
truck and it was the first ambulance that Kevin ever worked in.The six-wheeled Holden Emergency Care
ambulances of the 1970s were a uniquely South Australian design developed by
Mueller’s Bodywork on a one-tonner chassis modified, in many cases, by Holden
to Premier specifications.

Fleet 155
at Blackwood Centre in May 1991, when the last St.John Volunteer crews
operated in Adelaide.The fog lamps were a necessity in the damp
misty winter nights that prevail in the Adelaide Hills. Fleet 155 is an
example of the later type Twin-Life modules that were fitted to F150 utility
trays.Twin-Life ambulances were another
South Australian innovation developed by Javelin Bodyworks (Photo by Phil Dunkley).

Fleet 62 is a Mader
International Mercedes 315 Sprinter Ambulance Transport Service (ATS) Vehicle
sporting the current high-visibility livery that has been adopted by the South
Australian Ambulance Service (SAAS) after research from the University
of Adelaide.The ATS vehicles are marked Ambulance while the paramedic vehicles
are marked Emergency Ambulance
(Photo by Kevin Marsland 2008).

The Philips FM900R
Hi Band VHF/UHF Repeater Radio in the driver’s compartment of an F-250 Petrol
Twin-Life at Mount Pleasant Station 1992.Normally designed to operate on VHF simplex the system allowed the crew
at an incident to switch to repeat mode and carry a UHF hand-held radio. The
FM900R would receive the UHF signal from the hand-held and retransmit back to
base on VHF (Photo by William Watkins).